David Bowie, Lori Lightning and the flawed
humanity of idols

When a
beloved cultural icon dies, the white Western norm of not
speaking ill of the dead comes to the fore in extreme ways.
David Bowie’s death from cancer on January 10, age 69,
somehow felt like a more serious loss than some stars, like
having lost access to something bigger than himself. Bowie
is the kind of person whose death would feel surprising and
wrong even if he had lived to be a hundred, who had an aura
of immortality about him. But popular culture seems to feel
obligated to mourn its dead as saints, and decries any
discussion of their flaws and bad deeds as deeply
disrespectful. The resistance to this idea often pushes the
discussion back to an equally untenable pole, implying that
we should not grieve for people who have done bad things,
that we should regard them as a terrible person. Both of
these poles represent the two ways to dehumanise someone: to
demonise them and to worship them.

In the wake of
Bowie’s death, there has been a fair amount of internet
discussion about the fact that he had sex with groupie Lori
Lightning when she was 13 and he was around 26. Much of the
internet has quite understandably been quick to frame this
as sexual assault, and Bowie as an abuser. Certainly it is
statutory rape, and there are a whole host of ways in which
it is possible to say that what Bowie did was wrong. But to
tell Lori Lightning that her that age at the time means that
she didn’t consent, even though everything she says
indicates she did, is exactly the sort of gaslighting that
abusers do. This demonstrates the problem with messages
about how “kids can’t consent”; while it acknowledges
that free and informed consent to certain acts from children
is highly unlikely, it denies the agency of children in ways
that are harmful when it comes to children’s non-sexual
life. This kind of message is used to justify things like
hitting your child because they don’t know what’s good
for them, and gives license to not listen to children
because they have not been acknowledged as fully-formed
human beings. It also shows that Western culture has no
frameworks to deal with child sexuality; where to
acknowledge that child sexuality exists is seen as giving
carte blanche for adults—particularly men—to do what
they like with children.

This is a terrible dichotomy
indeed. Terrible in that it is thoroughly unnecessary; it is
possible to believe that 13-yr-old people can consent to sex
AND say that adults should absolutely not be having sex with
them. The power differential between adults and children is
too great; it is not merely isolated to sex, but in how
adults are set up to have total control over children’s
lives and wellbeing. In some ways this power differential is
necessary, as children do not always have the physical or
mental capacity to make healthy decisions for themselves.
Power can be and often is exercised for good, but there is a
persistent risk and reality that adults will not always use
their power solely to benefit the children in their
care.

Judging by everything she has said publicly, it is
clear that Lightning consented to and enjoyed her encounter
without regrets, and in her case that’s all there is to
it. In some cases the pleasure of fucking someone is not
merely sexual pleasure from the act itself but from what it
signifies; the euphoria of being wanted by a man of
Bowie’s talent and stature must have been intoxicating. A
groupie of the time wrote
in the comments of a story that “speaking for myself,
if these guys would have been willing to hang out with me,
like they did with men, I would have been just as happy. The
sex was the only way they were willing to connect with
me.” But by stepping up their social engagement to sexual,
Bowie took a phenomenal risk with Lightning’s wellbeing;
committing sexual acts with people that young often causes
lifelong
trauma and PTSD. Moreover, consent cannot be the only
metric to assess whether a sexual encounter has been
exploitative or not. Sometimes the exploitation in sexual
encounters comes from forces outside of the encounter
itself; a significant age gap being one example, the
inability of many women to enjoy sex because of patriarchal
body issues being another. Rebecca
Traister writes:

Contemporary feminism’s
shortcomings may lie in not its over¬radicalization but
rather its under¬radicalization. Because, outside of sexual
assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists
have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously
unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as
long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist
liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe,
in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity.
Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless,
exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist
culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding
prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some
young women wondering why they feel so fucked by
fucking.

Holding Bowie’s many wonderful
qualities in mind with the fact that he was willing to have
sex with a 13-yr-old girl speaks to the dissociative nature
of being a woman and engaging with music made by men. To
love and admire men like this while knowing that they’re
willing to risk massively fucking with your wellbeing; often
that they don’t care when they have massively
fucked with your wellbeing as long as they don’t have to
hear about it. To love Led Zeppelin and Nick Cave like
anyone else and to stretch yourself to try fit into the
protagonist’s position, yet be aware in the background of
your mind how much this music hates you or sees you as
nothing. Realising why “have you heard about the Midnight
Rambler” was spraypainted across a wall in a dark part of
Brooklyn, Wellington; left up for years even while the
council removed tagging that looked less white. To know that
these men we love will refuse to find beauty in the strong,
complex, challenging, intelligent nature of adult womanhood,
and prefer us at an age where we are more likely to be
compliant and naïve, more likely to act as mirrors to
reflect men at twice their natural size rather than demand
mutual and proportionate reflection. This aspect of
Bowie’s behaviour at the time, simultaneously predatory
and pathetic, is what disgusts me regardless of
Lightning’s feelings herself; that at my age he wanted in
ego flattery from 13-yr-old girls rather than sticking
exclusively to healthy adult relationships with women. A
woman quoted by Shulamith Firestone in her book The
Dialectic of Sex said that “no man can love a girl the
way a girl loves a man”. Indeed, we tend to love our men
for what they are, not what they do for us; masculinity
operates in the reverse.

The discussion over Bowie
represents the struggle of finding out bad things about
people we love and respect and not knowing quite how to
react. This struggle is particularly difficult because of
the particular nature of Bowie as an icon; as well as being
a great musician, he inspired and helped a lot of queer
people and misfits carve out a place for themselves in the
world. Bowie is the kind of star who saved people’s lives,
who let them know that their weirdnesses were okay and that
they were not alone. I loved Bowie for his musical
complexity; you can listen to his back catalogue for hours
and not get bored because how varied and interesting it is.
Besides, it is possible that Bowie later regretted his
actions at that age; even people who exhibit predatory
characteristics can and do change under the right
conditions. As
Aoife wrote at freethoughtblogs: “I’m supposed to
call him a monster because of this, and stop feeling sad
about his death. I can’t do that. I can call him someone
who did a monstrous thing, though.”

The exercise of
patriarchal and adult power isn’t all or nothing. Living
in patriarchy involves moments of absolute horror with a lot
of boredom the rest of the time, and is often mixed in with
pleasure in strange and perturbing ways. It doesn’t need
to be traumatic to be wrong; I can detail the ways in which
men hate me without feeling much emotion, but it’s still a
boring and annoying thing to deal with. The demand that
women feel constantly outraged or upset about patriarchy is
a liberalism that sees outrage as praxis in itself;
sometimes we need to conserve our energy so that we can
throw bricks when the time comes. Besides, we want to
love talented, interesting, witty, beautiful men like Bowie;
it is profoundly sad when aspects of their character make it
more difficult for us to do so.

In some ways this isn’t
much of an obituary. But despite Bowie’s flaws, I’m sad
that he’s gone, and have been playing his records
repeatedly like everyone else. I am grateful for the ways in
which he made my friends’ lives easier, for being able to
shout along to Life On Mars? with my best friend, for
what he did for queers, and for the way he made my bad
teeth look endearing. In this
rather lovely radio clip Scott Walker, a brilliant
musician and one of Bowie’s major influences, called him
up on his birthday to thank Bowie for everything he’d done
and for his “generosity of spirit when it comes to other
artists” which he’d been a beneficiary from himself. But
I choose to love Bowie as the flawed person he was; to try
to respect a cultural icon I had never met as a human being
rather than an idol. I’ll close with this clip of the
sweet and awkward young Bowie being interviewed by Russell
Harty in 1973, who asks “Do you indulge in any form of
worship?” to which Bowie pauses and then earnestly replies
“Life. I love life very much indeed.”

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